Akiko Yamazaki (left), wife of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (center), is a board member emeritus at the Ballet, with Gorretti Lui (right) a Symphony board member.

Akiko Yamazaki (left), wife of Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (center), is a board member emeritus at the Ballet, with Gorretti Lui (right) a Symphony board member.

Photo: Drew Altizer Photography, Drew Altizer

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Phil Libin

Phil Libin

Photo: Yue Wu, The Chronicle

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Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

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Matt Cohler

Matt Cohler

Photo: David Paul Morris, Bloomberg

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Max Levchin

Max Levchin

Photo: Kim Komenich, The Chronicle

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Old money welcomes new (tech) blood to the arts

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A century ago, the names of the founders and backers of many of San Francisco's fine arts organizations would have turned up in the Social Register - creators of old-money fortunes such as denim baron Levi Strauss, sugar baron Adolph Spreckels, railroad baron Charles Crocker, and, in more recent generations, oil heir Gordon Getty and Gap founder Don Fisher, among others.

But to find today's high-flying humanitarians, one must turn from the pages of a book and look to the cloud.

The face of San Francisco society is changing as the old guard gives way to a new watch whose fortunes are built on technology, social media and digital entrepreneurism, from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, 48, to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, 38, to Facebook exec-turned-venture capitalist Matt Cohler, 36.

Despite the long-held belief that techies don't know how to be charitable - having grown up without wealth and a tradition of giving - or prefer causes like education with measurable (or self-serving) results, the digerati are popping up in increasing numbers on civic and cultural boards in San Francisco. For proof, look no further than the San Francisco Opera, where in one fell swoop, not just one or two but seven high-profile Silicon Valley professionals were elected to the board (or 8.6 percent of the 81 members in total), Opera officials announced last month.

"With every generation, there is a natural passing of the baton, and I think we are seeing it now," said Trevor Traina, 40, who bridges the worlds as a member of an old money family (and who co-created the Fine Arts Museums Mid-Winter Gala to recruit young donors) and as an entrepreneur with several startups under his belt. "Tech entrepreneurs bring more than affluence to the party. They're extremely comfortable asking tough questions, reaching for major challenges and overcoming obstacles. They're unafraid and accustomed to thinking big."

Silicon Valley has had plenty of opportunity to step up to the plate, and many boards across the region have been dotted with tech leaders and venture capitalists throughout the decades. But a critical mass has developed only recently, and it is lending youth to boards across town, where members in their 70s, 80s and 90s are a common sight.

"I have long championed the idea that to be a better for-profit executive, one should serve on a nonprofit board. It has been hard to get tech people to do so, as how we work in the tech world is all-consuming," said Rusty Rueff, 51, the former CEO of online music and file-sharing site Snocap, who from 2003 to 2013 served on the board of the American Conservatory Theater. ACT is refurbishing the Strand Theater in the Mid-Market area, cheek-by-jowl with Twitter and other tech companies, in hopes of creating new cultural life and arts supporters in the city.

"Venture capitalists aren't all that interested in having their founders and teams spending time outside of the business until the business is established and into a later stage," Rueff said.

One explanation for the new participation is that the scions of Silicon Valley are maturing in age - and in their ability to focus on something other than the next big business idea. Case in point: Benioff's donation, with his wife, Lynne Benioff, of more than $100 million toward the creation of a $1.5 billion UCSF Medical Center in Mission Bay.

Another explanation is more elementary: Techies just needed to be asked.

New Jersey native Ben Nelson, 38, former Snapfish CEO and founder of Minerva University, has enjoyed the arts since childhood, thanks to an uncle who took him to performances at New York's Lincoln Center. In his 20s in Silicon Valley, Nelson attended the San Francisco Opera, which he considers among the world's finest, and donated about $2,000 a year - a small amount that did not register on the Opera board's radar. At 29, he sold Snapfish to the Hewlett-Packard Co., and called the Opera to say he was ready to do more.

The Opera board president at the time, George Hume, asked if he might donate $10,000 more. Nelson answered that he could, but he felt a more pressing need to increase the pool of young donors who, as their careers flourished, would turn into big-money donors. So in 2007, Nelson joined the board, where the more established members sometimes mistook him for a waiter, asking him for coffee and handing him their coats. They soon learned to take his ideas seriously, such as a challenge in which older donors would contribute matching funds in a bid to get greater numbers of young people to join. From that, the Orpheus program was born. Nelson also managed to get Calibre One, the recruitment firm he uses to scout for educators for his university, to perform pro bono searches (valued at several hundred thousand dollars) for new board members within the tech community. As a result of that search, Phil Libin, 41, the CEO of the note-taking app company Evernote, whose parents were classical musicians, received an e-mail from recruiters and is among the seven new members of the board.

If techies' fortunes are appealing, so are their skill sets. As the missions of arts organizations have become more complicated, these groups require board members with expertise in real estate, law, investments, marketing and, increasingly, technology.

"When I first started at museums, in the 1980s, they were open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., but increasingly, museums have reconceived of their social missions," said Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where board of trustees members include investment mogul Charles Schwab, Roselyne "Cissie" Swig, and Mayer, the Yahoo CEO. (She also sits on the board of the San Francisco Ballet.)

"We're places for people to come look at art, and that's the base upon which everything is built, but we have much more active education programs, larger marketing programs to get the word out to the world, and strong endowments that need to be managed with expertise," Benezra said.

Among the ideas that the younger set has brought to arts groups in San Francisco are a push for more contemporary art and family events at the Asian Art Museum, a balcony section at the San Francisco Symphony reserved for people who want to text, free admission for children under 18 at SFMOMA when its multimillion-dollar expansion is complete, and marketing contests to engage San Francisco Ballet audiences by asking them to tweet the plot of "Onegin" in 140 characters or fewer.

Globally renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar, 46, recently concluded a three-year artist-in-residence term on the SFMOMA board. While the museum is closed for renovations, it will mount exhibitions throughout the region, including one Béhar helped to develop called "Project Los Altos: SFMOMA in Silicon Valley." Béhar, who grew up in Switzerland and visited the great art museums of Europe as a child, said his experience "made me realize that if you don't have a great museum in your town, you probably don't have a great town," he said by e-mail. His work as a leading-edge designer of Jawbone devices and Sayl office chairs has taught him that "in the same way that we are transforming the way people live with tech, we should be supporting the artists that lead thinking and culture today."

New Opera board member Karen Richardson, 50, the former CEO of Epiphany software (whose husband is Apple iPod creator Jon Rubinstein), donated software to the Opera in 2003 to help it conduct outreach campaigns by e-mail. She likes opera's ability to combine "incredible singing, music and theater all in one art form," and because she no longer works around the clock, noting, "There came a point where I said, 'You give back,' rather than thinking solely about your career."

Ellen Magnin Newman, a San Francisco Symphony board member for 43 years, is impressed by her younger seatmates' abilities. PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, 38, "has a brain like a computer," she said. "Someone will say, 'We've had a 47 percent increase and he'll say, 'That's 2,044' without pulling out a calculator.

"They are very alert, very responsive, very active, and they know how to make decisions in a hurry" without being impulsive, she said. "They do their homework, they give thought to it, they move more quickly because they grew up in a digital world."

Cohler joined the Symphony board six years ago, influenced by his college major - music, with studies in classical composition and theory.

"I'm a very strong believer that music education is critical, not optional, in cognitive development for children," Cohler said.

He was also drawn by the Symphony's history as "an innovative, maverick organization." It was the first in the nation to have its own syndicated and sponsored radio program, "The Standard Hour," in 1926, and developed its own recording label and programs to be watched online as well as on TV's PBS.

"I'm a startup guy - that's my whole history, so that was exciting to me, in particular," Cohler said.

Former Yahoo executive Komal Shah, 43, joined the Asian Art Museum board to support an institution important for exposing second-generation Indian Americans and others to their cultural heritage, and to support the creativity so important to Silicon Valley. "Math and science are super-critical," she said, "but you need spiritual upliftment and outreach into new ideas. It's people with ideas who will move the world, like Steve Jobs."

Arts patron Harriet Quarré saw her first San Francisco Opera performance - "Aida," with Elisabeth Rethberg - as a child in 1935, and has been a board member since 1978.

She was considered an innovator in the 1980s in creating the Medallion Society, a membership group that granted participants perks such as free parking at performances, meet-and-greets with the orchestra, and backstage tours. Quarré is eager to see what the incoming board members will offer at their first official meeting on Sept. 19.

"I hope they learn to enjoy opera from the heart," she said. "We'll see what changes there will be, because I'm sure there will be some."